Spies are like the better dressed version of superheroes. They stop supervillains from destroying the world, and they do incredible superhuman feats, with the help of insane gadgets and vehicles. With a new Bourne movie in theaters on Friday, it's a great time to celebrate the "spy-fi" genre, that combines spies and…

For thousands of years, humans have been creating stories — and for just as long, they've been coming up with words to describe all the tools and techniques that make a story work. But these "literary devices" don't just show up in classical drama and Anglo-Saxon poetry. They also show up in today's science fiction.…

One of the great joys of watching science fiction and fantasy is to appreciate the unintentionally hilarious lines that come out of people's mouths sometimes. It's inevitable that when you're exploring mind-expanding premises and weird worlds, you're bound to run into some really insane conversations.

Part of the joy of science fiction is seeing all the awesome toys, and imagining how they could exist in the real world. And so many of science fiction's coolest gadgets have come true, including Star Trek's PADDs and communicators.

We've all experienced food cravings. In general they tend to be for things like potato chips, ice cream, and other high-calorie foods that doctors say will murder us. Some cravings, though, are the result of deep and correct instincts, telling us what we need to eat to stay alive. Here are ten ways your body's inner…

Hollywood loves remakes. After all, old movies have instant name recognition, and material that's already been proved to work on the screen before. When remaking a book adaptation, you can draw on the previous movie as well as the source material. Of course, remakes are hit and miss — as witness the trail of films like …

Prison food is notoriously terrible, and it's not like you can go out to a drive-thru when you get hungry between meal-times. But prison inmates are famous for their amazing creativity — and when they're not making shivs and other improvised weapons, they're creating some truly bizarre food items.

Nowadays, everybody says that science fiction has stopped talking about Big Ideas. Science fiction used to be the genre that asked the huge questions, about who we are and where we're going. But somehow, people say, the genre lost its appetite for deep thoughts.

Two things happened in the past week or so: Star Trek: The Next Generation's first season came out in eye-popping high definition. And Roberto Orci said that talks about a new Star Trek TV show are "almost real."

Scientists, by definition, investigate the unknown. And where there's the unknown, there's danger. (There's also a lot of immense tedium and fiddling around with trivial details.) Sometimes, an apparently run-of-the-mill scientific expedition can turn deadly, without any warning.